“Go on,” he said once, “tell us about some of your other boy-friends.” Her face went rigid, her mouth was open for a second before she spoke, then she answered with a rush of words. “Oh, I’ve had a few. I’ve never thought much of them. Not the boys round here. They’re a rough lot, not my type really. Maureen, my friend, she’s often tried to get me to make up a foursome. Too particular, that’s what she says I am. But I think, you can’t be too particular, that’s what I say. These chaps she goes with, no intelligence they’ve got. They just talk and talk and talk, and they wait for you to laugh and —” her voice rose to a comical wail — “they’re so silly really. And then they get fresh. Well, I mean, if you don’t make a chap respect you he knows you don’t respect yourself. Liberty-takers most of them are! Then these chaps that go up the dogs and all that! I always did say, a chap that gambles is a weakling. Don’t you think?” Her talk was carrying her she knew not where, like a runaway horse. She was too embarrassed to stop gabbling, and he had to save her by cutting in and desperately inventing an anecdote about how he had once gone to the dog races and learned his lesson.
He tried to discover why she was so defensive in her manner, so lacking in the natural sociability with which most of the inhabitants of the street were endowed.
“I hate that lot up on the corner,” she said. “Don’t you? All those boys? The way they whistle when you go past?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jack, remembering his own young days.
“I’ve never had anything to do with them,” she said with an almost vicious energy, “and I’m not sorry, either. I’ve got my mum to thank for that. She never used to let me play with just anyone, even when I was a kid. Ever so particular who I used to talk to, she was. Even after I left school. She used to ask, ‘Who you going out with?’ ‘Is she a nice girl?’ ‘That wasn’t Maisie Keenan I saw you with, was it?’ That Maisie Keenan. Do you remember her? She got married in the war, and good riddance.”
“Yes.” Jack smothered a grin of knowing reminiscence. “I knew Maisie. She was a lad, all right.” A nostalgic recollection came to him. “We all had bikes in my time. Proper craze, it was. We had a good time, too, mucking around in the evenings and all going out together at weekends.”
“I know,” there was a sudden leap of response in her voice. “I wanted one once. I cried my eyes out over it, night after night. Dad wanted to get me one. But mum said she had better things to do with her money than let me kill myself under a bus. She said she could just see herself letting me fly about in a pair of shorts showing everything off.”
He taxed her with her submission to the lazy tyranny which her mother exercised in the house. Except for one occasion when she cried, “My mum won’t give me credit for being grown up,” she would defend her mother, or merely reply, with a tell-tale drag of hopelessness in her voice, “Oh, mum’s all right.” Once she added, “Besides, I won’t always be living here.”
At moments like this their conversations would break down and they would lapse into an embarrassed silence; for there was a limit to their confidences. As soon as either of them revealed, in some unthinking remark, the hopes which by now Jack knew they both cherished, both of them would shrink back. Neither of them knew how to go forward on to a more intimate footing.
Jack, for his part, spoke mostly of his youth in Lamb Street, which his memory served up to him as a sort of Golden Age; of the war, about which it gave him a sense of joyous relief to brag and yarn until one evening he realised, from the remote look in Joyce’s eyes, that he might as well have been telling her how Drake beat the Armada; and about his new job. He was finding it hard going. For the last couple of years abroad his duties had been mainly supervisory and, muscular though he was, he came home every evening aching throughout his body at the unaccustomed toil. His employer, not yet knowing his capabilities, left him in the workshop, sawing and planing while other men went out to install the fittings. “Boy’s work,” he said bitterly, “and I’m older than most of them. Snotty-nosed kids, that’s all they are, never done a real craftsman’s job any of them. And the way they take the mickey out of me — try to, anyway — you wouldn’t think they’d never heard a shot fired in anger.”
Mrs. Wakerell watched their clumsy courtship with complacent interest. Sometimes Jack felt angry under her knowing scrutiny. He wanted to tell her that he knew all about her little plot, and there were even moments when he felt so humiliated that he wanted to pack his bags and run away. He was frightened, too, by the knowledge that a similar feeling of shame was at work in Joyce. However, he could not help liking Mrs. Wakerell, and he was convinced that her kindness to him was, at bottom, disinterested. Since Jack and Joyce were not deficient in the human talent for defeating circumstances by accepting them, they came at last to believe that they were outwitting Mrs. Wakerell by sharing the knowledge of her intentions. When, as they went out together, she said, “Enjoy yourselves, my dears,” they would exchange guarded smiles. They considered themselves to be in alliance against her, although the conspiracy remained tacit.
Jack had been home for three weeks and had been going about with Joyce for a fortnight when he decided that it was time for the next step. Other people had begun to notice the change in Joyce. Neighbours remarked that she was looking well. Her father heard her singing to herself in her room and asked her at breakfast if she had come into a fortune. She was still obedient to her mother’s incessant commands, but she had acquired the gift of infusing a hint of restrained mockery into her quiet replies. It flattered Jack’s vanity to know that he was responsible for all this. It added to the feeling he gained from their constant proximity — at meals, talking to each other while she was washing her hair in the kitchen, passing each other half-dressed on the landing — that he was already half-way to being a husband. Yet once they were out of doors they were nothing more than old friends to each other. The barrier of shyness remained.
They were coming home one evening from a dance. The heat in the hall had been sweltering. They had danced stiffly and ceremoniously together. Jack had been unable to abandon himself to her embrace and had felt the same resistance in her. Other women had inflamed him in the intimacy of a dance, but she — he could not understand why — daunted him. Even walking at her side in the cool street he felt tamed and without ardour.
It was therefore quite cold-bloodedly, as a matter of tactics and as a test of his own courage that he decided that he must kiss her tonight.
They reached the house and went into the kitchen. She made tea. When they had finished she yawned demonstratively and said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for bed.” He followed her into the hall, and at the foot of the stairs he took her arm and said, “Here, what’s the hurry? Let’s sit in the parlour for a bit.”
“Whatever for?”
“I don’t know. Talk a bit.”
Her face, half averted, betrayed a piteous consternation. She shook her hair, closed her mouth angrily and blinked. “On the sofa with the lights off, I suppose,” she said in a grating voice.
“Well, I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Usual thing, ain’t it?”
“Not for me it isn’t.” She gripped the knob of the banisters and stared at her own knuckles, a picture of panic. “Let go of me.”
He let his hand drop. She hurried up a couple of steps, paused, said agitatedly, “G’night, Jack,” and scuttled up to her room.
This repulse came as a shock to Jack, whose hopes had been raised by the soft and compliant manner in which Joyce had followed him about for the last few days. His confidence in his own judgment collapsed. He went up to his room in a bitter and despondent mood. Where was the courage which had lightened his step for the last week? Where were the speeches he had composed and silently rehearsed day after day at work? Where were the manly understanding, the boldness and the resourcefulness on which he had begun to pride himself? He reproached himself for not having persisted. One scared reply from her, and he had let go her arm and s
tood gaping while she escaped. Surely there was something he could have said to hold her, something graceful to flatter her, something amusing to charm her, some assurance, softly and slowly spoken, to allay her terror?
Lying in bed in a daze of self-reproach and self-pity, he stared at the ceiling, sleepless and miserable. He was unable to calm himself by rallying his thoughts and planning his next move. The inarticulacy that fettered him was not of speech alone; his thoughts, too, were inarticulate. A new situation, or a remark addressed to him, on any but the most trivial of matters, would scare up inside him a flock of unformed and contradictory ideas which hurtled about, getting in each other’s way, colliding with each other, each eluding capture until he was thoroughly maddened, and fighting vainly for release with such power that his head would ache as if they were all battering at the inside of his skull. He would rather wrestle, any day, with a man twice his own size than with a problem that demanded clear and logical thinking. A hard day at the bench was less exhausting than a half-hour’s brainwork.
As the night went by his bitterness against himself turned into anger against Joyce. This usually happened with him. When he had been trapped into a conversation that made excessive demands on him, he would rage against his innocent interlocutor; if a crisis caught him unawares and left him too confused to act until it was too late, he would choke with resentment against whoever had unwittingly reminded him of his own inadequacy.
“The bitch,” he said to himself in the darkness, “the silly little bitch! Having me on like that! Don’t know her own mind! What’s she afraid of? Who does she think I am, anyway, mucking me about like that?”
He went down to breakfast the next morning in a bad temper. He avoided Joyce, muttered an unintelligible reply to her timid greeting, toyed sulkily with his food like a small boy who wants to show that he is hurt, and glared at her in triumph when her mother told him that he looked pale this morning.
At work, the day seemed endless. The workshop was hot and things that did not usually worry him — the smell of dust and glue, the nagging drone of the circular saw, the sawdust which he inhaled and which settled itchily on his sweaty skin — combined to torment him. He drove his jack-plane as if he were punishing Joyce and snarled when his employer pointed out mildly that he had both blunted the blade of the plane and spoiled a good piece of wood. He was tired from lack of sleep, his thoughts were still clamant and confused, and — worst of all — he felt more of a fool every minute. He went to the cinema alone in the evening and sat impatiently through a stupid film which he had seen before. He went to bed early and had another unhappy night.
When he came face to face with Joyce the next morning she was cold and calm towards him. He said, “Good morning” in a questioning voice and she answered curtly.
They both ate their breakfast in a subdued mood. He kept looking at her as if expecting her to say something; sometimes he caught her glancing at him. He tried to think of something to say, but without success.
Embarrassed, he swallowed the last of his tea and rose to go out. He said, “Well, s’long.” She raised her teacup to her lips, looking down into it to avoid his eyes. She tried to sip, and gasped with annoyance as a nervous jerk of her hand spilled tea. The breath in his throat felt icy cold for a second. He stared at her. Conscious of his stare, she put her cup down, still looking at it. The blood rushed to her cheeks.
He said roughly, trying to make his words sound as casual as possible, “Here, what about tonight? I’m going on the lake up Finsbury Park. Room for two in the old boat. No use wasting money. You can come if you want.”
She turned pale, then blushed more fiercely than before. She raised her head as if it were too heavy. “As you like —” — there was a tiny quiver in the first few words; the rest of her reply was in the same tone of indifference as his invitation — “— I’ve got nothing better to do.”
They spent the evening together in the park and returned in a good humour. In the hall he said, “Sittin’ up for a bit?” and pointed to the parlour. His mood was as passionless and calculating as it had been two nights earlier. All his thoughts were about himself; it was his own courage that concerned him. His attitude to Joyce was that of a rider to a horse which has thrown him once. She followed him into the parlour like a victim and sat beside him on the sofa. They talked for a while in dead voices. Jack sat with his hands clasped between his knees. He asked, “Want the light on?”
She said, “No, it’s all right.”
He put his arms round her waist and kissed the side of her face. She drew back a little. He pressed her back, stretching his body over hers, and kissed her on the mouth. She felt as hard as a board against him, and her lips hardly moved beneath his. She clutched his shoulders, not in desire but as if fighting pain. They sprawled together for a while. He was wondering at the inertness of his own body; holding her, he felt only lethargic and content. It would be pleasant to go to sleep like this. He forced himself to think about his next move; not to rouse himself or her, but with purely experimental intent. He put his hand over a slack, soft breast. There was no response; but at least he had made the nature of their relations clear; there ought to be no fear of losing ground now. A few more tasteless kisses to stamp and seal the business, and he sat back. She leaned back against the headrest, and sighed. They were sitting apart again, and in silence.
They listened to the dance music that came from a distant radio set, and to the people who were still talking in the street. Once they laughed together at a sudden exchange of abuse that shrilled from a window opposite. Jack was wondering how to extricate himself from this silence. Alarm grew in him at the way in which he was letting his latest successes ebb away. What should he do next? Make another grab at her? — but what then? Mumble ‘goodnight’ and go off to bed? — but what a defeat that would be! He dared not press her too far, but he was aware that in some subtle way the night’s business was unfinished, and he did not know how to finish it.
It was Joyce who, astonishingly, made the next move. He did not reflect until years later on the courage that she must have needed at this moment. She, too, must have been filled with hesitation, with shame at her own shyness, with the same fear as his that they would lose the ground they had gained and would meet in the morning constrained and apart once more; not that he ever gave her the credit she deserved — for, looking back on that moment, he thought how different things might have been if he — he! — had not gone through with it.
She picked up his hand, as if it did not belong to him, and began to examine it. He looked on as if he, too, did not recognize the hand as a part of himself. Her fingers passed gently, like a blind woman’s, over his broad, rough finger-tips, lingering compassionately over a split, blackened nail. With the nail of her forefinger she scratched softly at the hard skin of the palm. Timidly she lifted the hand up to her mouth; he suspected that she was surprised by the dead weight of it. She gave him a startled sidelong blink, then bent her head again and touched his knuckles with her lips.
He almost laughed. He leaned over her, and they kissed warmly. He stroked her back, feeling with relief the nervous movements beneath the fabric of her dress. Her breath touched his cheek in warm, regular jets, and the faint, chestnut taste of her mouth remained in his. At last his sense of possession was unchallenged. There was nothing to sap his self-respect; he was sure that everything was going to be all right.
After that they went, unhurriedly, to their rooms.
It became a habit for them to go into the parlour every night before bedtime, and to sit in the dark, holding hands, hugging each other, kissing occasionally and talking quietly of unimportant things.
Jack experienced a new elation which arose more from the banishment of uncertainty than from his feelings for Joyce. His vanity was restored, the critic inside him silenced. He had been in the dark, but from here onwards he knew the way. Male pride could be discerned both in his voice and in his gait. Indeed, he was so carried away by his bravado that his excited t
ongue brought the affair rapidly to a climax while his mind, outpaced and bewildered once more, scarcely grasped what was happening. While he was flushed and fuddled, Joyce remained calm. She did not cling to him, blush at his gaze or show any ardour in his embrace. Instead she assumed a confident and businesslike concern in all his affairs. She told him off because there were holes in his socks, criticised her mother for letting his tea get cold, showed him where he could buy shirts more cheaply, praised his taste in ties, made fun of his red ears, hung plastic curtains in his bedroom, and so kept him stupid with delight.
In little more than a week he was ready to take the final plunge. He took her out of the house after tea and walked with her along Upper Street, wondering how to introduce the subject of marriage. He paused in front of a shop window. “Here —” he pointed to a white silk blouse with a lace collar and pleated breast — “that’s just your style, I reckon. Just suit you, that, with a long, dark skirt, and you ought to do your hair right back on both sides, like, to go with it.”
“Bit too school-teachery for me.”
“No. Ladylike, that’s all. Just your style.”
She said that she would rather have a flowered summer frock.
“Ah,” he said, “that’s all right. Cool, it looks. Don’t cost such a lot either. Smashin’ nightdress over there. Look, that blue one. Silk, ain’ it?”
“Cut low, isn’t it?”
“Well?” he said boldly. The conversation came to a stop.
They went on window-shopping, growing more and more excited. Jack was as enraptured as if he were really buying her these beautiful new clothes or furnishing a home for the two of them. Soon they were both absorbed in the game, like children; but it had a double meaning for both of them.
“That’s what I call classy.” They were looking at a bedroom suite. “Walnut veneer,” Jack said. “Look at that dressing table. See you in front of that combing your hair, eh? Talk about Rita Hayworth!”
Rosie Hogarth Page 6
